'Other Than That' backstory:

May, 2011 - After a record is finished, there is always what I call "spillage" of post-album material that keeps gushing out, as if once the spigot is on it's almost impossible to turn off - not a bad thing at all. So in this light I suddenly found myself thinking about several characters I've run across over time, and it snowballed from there. We all know the type, full-of-themselves to the max. And who knows, each of us might even have a touch or two of this characters uh, qualities ourselves. Two weeks later I had 17 verses, no music, and no idea what I would do with it. The naked lyric was nothing even close to anything I'd written before in both narrative and sheer number of verses. But since I try not to fight an impulse of inspiration if it's kind enough to visit, I just went along for the ride and a fun time to boot, at some points absolutely laughing my ass off. After reciting the lyric to several friends and family members, and noting their very positive response, I thought this might be a good opportunity for some levity on some future record or single.

By the time I'd memorized the lyric, two months later, all eleven songs for the 'Deep Water' CD were in the hands of mixmasters Mike Shipley and Brian Wohlgemuth. I hadn't even mentioned 'Other Than That' to my mix team because the record was done as far as I could tell. It wasn't till my old friend Karen heard me recite the lyric, and strongly suggested I recite it for Shipley, and put it on the album, that made me even consider it. During one of Mike's few phone calls over the course of the mixing I asked him if he had four and-a-half minutes. He did. I recited the lyrics to him pretty much the way you hear it now except with no drums, just finger snapping, and all he said after was "you gotta put it on the record". That's all the reaffirmation I needed to blaze on ahead and record and edit this tune as fast as I could. The boys were nearly done mixing and the window on them being available was closing.

The Recording:

Mike and I agreed all the track needed was vocal and drums, mirroring a conversation I'd had a few days earlier with Bryan Kessler regarding the same. Bryan thought I should record it singing live with drums, but though a cool idea, time was a factor and I had no choice but to go another route.

Upstairs in the studio I found some very cool Danny Gottlieb drum loops with brushes in my RMX sound library that fit exactly what I was after, which once again was that fifties brushes groove that jazz singers Lambert Hendricks and Ross had employed so well behind many of their vocal stylings. Here it was some thirty-five or more years since I'd even listened to them and their influence is yet felt.

After recording the drum loops I got down to work on the vocals. Since I'm not usually one to record using the stop-and-start method, I just hit record on the remote recording device, start at the top, and sing all the way through the whole take. And since I had never performed this lyric but for a few friends, and wasn't familiar with all the possibilities as to where the phrasing and melody could venture, I took many takes and experimented as I went. After exhausting all the cool alternatives I ceased. Because the vocal was going to be out there in the sonic spheres with only drums as a companion, I took my time in editing them into one comp take, making sure it was hopefully gonna hold up in time.

Now the song needed real drums, and since Joel Taylor had done such brilliant work already on four songs on the 'Deep Water' album, and had his own recording set-up at home on top of that, I contacted him. Luckily he was in town and could make the time to track ASAP. After I explained what I was looking for and listening to the drum loops I had provided him, Joel sat down and actually wrote out his parts for every verse, so that he could play along with my vocal accents, rhythms, and stops. He said there were like 7 pages of music notation when he was done. He recorded two takes and bounced them back over the infinite internet and voila 'Other Than That' had an arch to it's eyebrow. I edited what I thought best from both drum tracks into one, and that's all she wrote. Within two weeks the song was recorded, edited and being downloaded to Mike Shipley's The Living Room mix studios in LA.